The coming of a spiritual age must be preceded by the appearance of an increasing number of individuals who are no longer satisfied with the normal intellectual, vital and physical existence of man, but perceive that a greater evolution is the real goal of humanity and attempt to effect it in themselves, to lead others to it, and to make it the recognized goal of the human race. In proportion as they succeed and to the degree to which they carry this evolution, the yet unrealized potentiality which they represent will become an actual possibility of the future. Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950) Indian British philosopher, Hindu mystic, The Human Cycle, Ideal of Human Unity, War and Self Determination, Lotus Press, 1st edition 1. January 1970, 2nd edition 1. June 1997

If we may judge from the modern movement, the progress of the reason as a social renovator and creator, if not interrupted in its course, would be destined to pass through three successive stages which are the very logic of its growth,

the first individualistic and increasingly democratic with liberty for its principle,

the second socialistic, in the end perhaps a governmental communism with equality and the State for its principle,

the third – if that ever gets beyond the stage of theory – anarchistic in the higher sense of that much-abused word, either a loose voluntary cooperation or a free communalism with brotherhood or comradeship and not government for its principle.

It is in the transition to its third and consummating stage, if or whenever that comes, that the power and sufficiency of the reason will be tested; it will then be seen whether the reason can really be the master of our nature, solve the problems of our interrelated and conflicting egoisms and bring about within itself a perfect principle of society or must give way to a higher guide. For till this third stage has its trial, it is Force that in the last resort really governs. Reason only gives to Force the plan of its action and a system to administer. Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950) Indian British philosopher, Hindu mystic, The Human Cycle, Ideal of Human Unity, War and Self Determination, "The Curve of the Rational Age", S. 181-182, Lotus Press, 1st edition 1. January 1970, 2nd edition 1. June 1997

A movement in the case of a work like mine means the founding of a school or a sect or some other damned nonsense. It means that hundreds or thousands of useless people join in and corrupt the work or reduce it to a pompous farce from which the Truth that was coming down recedes into secrecy and silence. It is what has happened to the “religions” and is the reason of their failure. Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950) Indian British philosopher, Hindu mystic, On Himself, "Introduction", S. 375-376, Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Sri Aurobindo Society, December 1972, 7th edition 31. May 1991

To the ordinary man who lives upon his own waking surface, ignorant of the self's depths and vastnesses behind the veil, his psychological existence is fairly simple. A small but clamourous company of desires, some imperative intellectual and aesthetic cravings, some tastes, a few ruling or prominent ideas amid a great current of unconnected or ill-connected and mostly trivial thoughts, a number of more or less imperative vital needs, alternations of physical health and disease, a scattered and inconsequent succession of joys and griefs, frequent minor disturbances and vicissitudes and rarer strong searchings and upheavals of mind or body, and through it all Nature, partly with the aid of his thought and will, partly without or in spite of it, arranging these things in some rough practical fashion, some tolerable disorderly order, – this is the material of his existence. Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950) Indian British philosopher, Hindu mystic, author, The Synthesis of Yoga, S. 74-75, 1. January 1948, Lotus Press, 1. January 1990, Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Sri Aurobindo Society, 3rd edition 10. August 2006

95. Only by perfect renunciation of desire or by perfect satisfaction of desire can the utter embrace of God be experienced; for in both ways the essential precondition is effected – desire perishes. Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950) Indian British philosopher, Hindu mystic, author, Thoughts and Aphorisms, Lotus Press, 5th revised edition 1. January 1982

Disciple: What is it that creates physicalbeauty?Sri Aurobindo: There is a certain vital glow which is really not beauty – when it is overpowering and full of personal magnetism it is dangerous.Disciple: Does the artist get his form from the vital only?Sri Aurobindo: No. But these arts are such that they require their stand in the vital. There may be other elements in them but the vital is indispensable. In fact, the highest poetry cannot come unless through the vital. One may take the elements from the mind or emotion or other parts according to necessity.Disciple: How far is mind a factor in the process?Sri Aurobindo: If you mean the intellectual mind it has a very little part – though it, too, has a part. The whole process is very complicated. The first impulse is given by the vital and then there is communication with the higher mind – the intuitive faculty. Then something from there comes down to the heart and the artist again takes it up into the mind, and gives expression to it.Disciple: That is to say, something from above comes down through intuition.Sri Aurobindo: Yes, some power from above. I use the word "Intuition" in the general sense for all the faculties that act; more properly it is "Inspiration". Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950) Indian British philosopher, Hindu mystic, Evening Talks with Sri Aurobindo, recorded by A.B. Purani, Third Series, section 1-0122, 23. January 1939

Disciple: Then it is the Cosmic Spirit that is responsible for the evil?Sri Aurobindo: Yes, the Cosmic Spirit that is responsible for both – good and evil, you can't say it is responsible for one and not the other. Through both – good and evil – and their struggle between Light and Darkness, the Cosmic Spirit works out its purpose in evolution. Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950) Indian British philosopher, Hindu mystic, Evening Talks with Sri Aurobindo, recorded by A.B. Purani, Third Series, section 1-0122, 23. January 1939

His [man's] politics and society are a series of adventures and experiments among various possibilities of autocracy, monarchism, military aristocracy, mercantile oligarchy, open or veiled plutocracy, pseudo-democracy of various kinds, bourgeois or proletarian, individualistic or collectivist or bureaucratic, socialism awaiting him, anarchism looming beyond it; and all these correspond to some truth of his social being, some need of his complex social nature, some instinct or force in it which demands that form for its effectuation. Mankind works out these difficulties under the stress of the spirit within it by throwing out a constant variation of types, types of character and temperament, types of practical activity, aesthetic creation, polity, society, ethical order, intellectual system, which vary from the pure to the mixed, from the simple harmony to the complex; each and all of these are so many experiments of individual and collective self-formation in the light of a progressive and increasing knowledge. That knowledge is governed by a number of conflicting ideas and ideals around which these experiments group themselves: each of them is gradually pushed as far as possible in its purity and again mixed and combined as much as possible with others so that there may be a more complex form and an enriched action. Each type has to be broken in turn to yield place to new types and each combination has to give way to the possibility of a new combination. Through it all there is growing an accumulating stock of self-experience and self-actualisation of which the ordinary man accepts some current formulation conventionally as if it were an absolute law and truth – often enough he even thinks it to be that – but which the more developed human being seeks always either to break or to enlarge and make more profound or subtle in order to increase or make room for an increase of human capacity, perfectibility, happiness. Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950) Indian British philosopher, Hindu mystic, The Human Cycle, Ideal of Human Unity, War and Self Determination, The human cycle. The psychology of social development, S. 118, Lotus Press, 2nd edition 1. January 1970

Equality does not mean a fresh ignorance or blindness; it does not call for and need not initiate a greyness of vision and a blotting out of all hues. Difference is there, variation of expression is there and this variation we shall appreciate, — far more justly than we could when the eye was clouded by a partial and erring love and hate, admiration and scorn, sympathy and antipathy, attraction and repulsion. But behind the variation we shall always see the Complete and Immutable who dwells within it and we shall feel, know or at least, if it is hidden from us, trust in the wise purpose and divine necessity of the particular manifestation, whether it appear to our human standards harmonious and perfect or crude and unfinished or even false and evil. Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950) Indian British philosopher, Hindu mystic, source unknown

Man is a transitional being: he is not final. For in man, and high beyond him ascend the radiant degrees that climb to a divine supermanhood. There lies our destiny and the liberating key to our aspiring but limited and mundane existence. Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950) Indian British philosopher, Hindu mystic, The Hour of God. Selections From His Writings, S. 7, Sahitya Akademi, 12. June 1995

Aurobindo: I will say something about belief and then you try to understand it by what it is not. Mental faith believes in an idea. That is to say, mind believes in what it thinks. The vital believes in what it desires, and the physical believes in what it senses.Disciple: Does the transformation come first or the realisation of the Divine Consciousness?Aurobindo: How can you have the transformation without the Higher Power?Disiciple: Is it a process that demands faith in all the parts of our nature?Aurobindo: Yes. It demands ➤ a mental faith which is the anticipation of the knowledge that is coming.➤ Vital faith anticipates the effectuation that is coming.➤ Faith in the physical anticipates what is going to be realised.Disciple: Is there a difference between effectuation and realisation?Aurobindo: Yes, there is a difference. Effectuation is the work of force, realisation is a fact. This object lying here is a fact, it is not a force.Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950) Indian British philosopher, Hindu mystic, Evening Talks with Sri Aurobindo, recorded by A.B. Purani, 1920-1943

If one wishes to purify and transform the nature, it is the power of these higher ranges to which one must open and raise to them and change by them both the subliminal and the surface being. […] But to begin by opening up the lower subconscious, risking to raise up all that is foul or obscure in it, is to go out of one’s way to invite trouble. First, one should make the higher mind and vital strong and firm and full of light and peace from above; afterwards one can open up or even dive into the subconscious with more safety and some chance of a rapid and successful change. Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950) Indian British philosopher, Hindu mystic, Letters, S. 1606-1607

Disiciple: He says that war is avoidable.Aurobindo: There is no objection to that, but how is war to be avoided? How can you prevent war when the other fellow wants to fight? You can prevent it by becoming stronger than he, or by a combination that is stronger than he, or you change his heart, as Gandhiji says, by passive resistance or Satyagraha.And even there Gandhiji has been forced to admit that none of his followers knows the science of passive resistance. In fact, he says, he is the only person who knows all about Satyagraha. It is not very promising for Satyagraha, considering that it is intended to be a general solution for all men. What some people have done at some places in India is not Satyagraha but Duragraha. Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950) Indian British philosopher, Hindu mystic, Evening Talks, recorded by A.B. Purani

He is merged in the vast and free impersonality of the pure Spirit; he becomes the Bhraman; he knows himself as one with the one self in all things. He is no longer aware of ego, no longer troubled by the dualities, no longer feels the anguish of grief or the disturbances of joy, is no longer shaken by desire, is no longer troubled by sin or limited by virtue. Or if the shadows of these things remain, he sees and knows them only as nature working in her own qualities. Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950) Indian British philosopher, Hindu mystic, Essays on the Gita pg. 580, 1916-1920

There are some human beings who are like vampires. What are they and why are they like that?They are not human; there is only a human form or appearance. They are incarnations of beings from the world that is just next to the physical, beings who live on the plane which we call the vital world. It is a world of all the desires and impulses and passions and of movements of violence and greed and cunning and every kind of ignorance; but all the dynamisms too are there, all the life-energies and all the powers. The beings of this world have by their nature a strange grip over the material world and can exercise upon it a sinister influence.Some of them are formed out of the remains of the human being that persist after death in the vital atmosphere near to the earth-plane. His desires and hungers still float there and remain in form even after the dissolution of the body; often they are moved to go on manifesting and satisfying themselves and the birth of these creatures of the vital world is the consequence. But these are minor beings and, if they can be very troublesome, it is yet not impossible to deal with them.There are others, far more dangerous, who have never been in human form; never were they born into a human body upon earth, for most often they refuse to accept this way of birth because it is slavery to matter and they prefer to remain in their own world, powerful and mischievous, and to control earthly beings from there. For, if they do not want to be born on earth, they do want to be in contact with the physical nature, but without being bound by it.Their method is to try first to cast their influence upon a man; then they enter slowly into his atmosphere and in the end may get complete possession of him, driving out entirely the real human soul and personality. These creatures, when in possession of an earthly body, may have the human appearance but they have not a human nature. Their habit is to draw upon the life-force of human beings; they attack and capture vital power wherever they can and feed upon it. If they come into your atmosphere, you suddenly feel depressed and exhausted; if you are near them for some time you fall sick; if you live with one of them, it may kill you.– But how is one to get such creatures out of one’s environment when they are once there?The vital power incarnated in these beings is of a very material kind and it is effective only within a short distance. Ordinarily, if you do not live in the same house or if you are not in the same company with them, you do not come within their influence. But if you open some channel of connection or communication, through letters, for example, then you make possible an interchange of forces and are liable to be influenced by them even from a far distance.The wisest way with these beings is to cut off all connection and have nothing to do with them – unless indeed you have great occult knowledge and power and have learned how to cover and protect yourself – but even then it is always a dangerous thing to move about with them. To hope to transform them, as some people do, is a vain illusion; for they do not want to be transformed. They have no intention of allowing any transformation and all effort in that direction is useless.These beings, when in the human body, are not often conscious of what they really are. Sometimes they have a vague feeling that they are not quite human in the ordinary way. But still there are cases where they are conscious and very conscious; not only do they know that they do not belong to humanity but they know what they are, act in that knowledge and deliberately pursue their ends. The beings of the vital world are powerful by their very nature; when to their power they add knowledge, they become doubly dangerous.There is nothing to be done with these creatures; you should avoid having any dealings with them unless you have the power to crush and destroy them. If you are forced into contact with them, beware of the spell they can cast. These vital beings, when they manifest on the physical plane, have always a great hypnotic power; for the centre of their consciousness is in the vital world and not in the material and they are not veiled and dwarfed by the material consciousness as human beings are. Sri Aurobindo [Aurobindo Ghose] (1872-1950) Indian British Hindu philosopher, yogi, mystic, guru, freedom fighter, poet, The Hidden Forces of Life. Selections from the Works of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Lotus Brands, Wisconsin, June 1999, Sri Aurobindo Ashram Publications, Pondicherry, India, 1st edition 16. March 2009

A dangerous habit is constant self-justification. When this becomes strong in the seeker, it is impossible to turn him in this part of the being to the right consciousness and action because at each step his whole preoccupation is to justify himself. His mind rushes at once to maintain his own idea, his own position or his own course of action.This he is ready to do by any kind of argument, sometimes the most clumsy and foolish or inconsistent with what he has been protesting the moment before [but not obvious to him], by any kind of mis-statement or any kind of device. This is a common misuse, but nonetheless a misuse of the thinking mind; but it takes in him exaggerated proportions and so long as he keeps to it, it will be impossible for him to see or live the Truth. Sri Aurobindo [Aurobindo Ghose] (1872-1950) Indian British Hindu philosopher, yogi, mystic, guru, freedom fighter, poet, The Integral Yoga. Sri Aurobindo's Teaching and Method of Practice. Selected Letters, S. 256, Sri Aurobindo Ashram Publications Department, 1. June 2006

Poetry

There is no visible foe, but the unseenIs around us, forces intangible besiege,Touches from alien realms, thoughts not our ownOvertake us and compel the erring heart;Our lives are caught in an ambitious net.A grisly company of maladies Come, licensed lodgers, into man's bodily house,In the malignant hollows of the world,In its subconscient cavern-passages Ambushed they lie waiting their hour to leap,Surrounding with danger the sieged city of life:Admitted into the citadel of man's daysThey mine his force and maim or suddenly kill.

Quotes on 'hostile forces' by Sri Aurobindo

Men are being constantly invaded by the hostiles and there are great numbers of men who are partly or entirely under their influence. Some are possessed by them, others (a few) are incarnations of hostile beings. At the present moment they are very active all over the earth. Of course in the outside world there is no consciousness, such as is developed in yoga, by which they can either become aware of or consciously repel the attacks – the struggle in them between the psychic and the hostile force goes on mostly behind the veil or so far as it is on the surface is not understood by the mind.The first attempt of the possessing entity is to separate the person from his psychic [soul], and it is that that creates the struggle. All depends on the extent and persistence of the possession – how much of the being it occupies and whether it is constant or not. […]To say that all light is good is as if you said that all water is good – or even that all clear or transparent water is good: it would not be true. One must see what is the nature of the light or where it comes from or what is in it, before one can say that it is the true Light. False lights exist and misleading lustres, lower lights too that belong to the being's inferior reaches. One must therefore be on one's guard and distinguish; the true discrimination has to come by growth of the psychic feeling and a purified mind and experience.Evil forces can always attack in moments of unconsciousness or half-consciousness or through the subconscient or external physical – so long as all is not supramentally transformed. The hostile forces do not need a cause for attacking – they attack whenever and whoever they can. What one has to see is that nothing responds or admits them.The hostile forces have a certain self-chosen function: it is to test the condition of the individual, of the work, of the earth itself and their readiness for the spiritual descent and fulfillment. At every step of the journey, they are there attacking furiously, criticizing, suggesting, imposing despondency or inciting to revolt, raising unbelief, amassing difficulties. [...]These attacks very ordinarily become violent when the progress is becoming rapid and on the way to be definite – especially if they find they cannot carry out an effective aggression into the inner being, they try to shake by outside assaults. One must take it as a trial of strength, a call for gathering all one's capacities of calm and openness to the Light and Power, so as to make oneself an instrument for the victory of the Divine over the undivine, of the Light over the darkness in the world-tangle. It is in this spirit that you must face these difficulties till the higher things are so confirmed in you that these forces can attack no longer.There are two things that make it impossible for them [the hostile forces] to succeed even temporarily in any attack on the mind or the vital – first, an entire love, devotion and confidence that nothing can shake, secondly, a calm and equality in the vital as well as in the mind which has become the fundamental character of the inner nature. Suggestions then may still come, things go wrong outside, but the being remains invulnerable. Either of these two things is sufficient in itself – and in proportion as they grow, even the existence of the hostile forces becomes less and less of a phenomenon of the inner life – though they may still be there in the outer atmosphere. Sri Aurobindo [Aurobindo Ghose] (1872-1950) Indian British Hindu freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru, mystic, poet, Letters on Yoga, Volume III, 1970, Lotus Press, 3rd edition 1. June 1988

There are some human beings who are like vampires. What are they and why are they like that?They are not human; there is only a human form or appearance. They are incarnations of beings from the world that is just next to the physical, beings who live on the plane which we call the vital world. It is a world of all the desires and impulses and passions and of movements of violence and greed and cunning and every kind of ignorance; but all the dynamisms too are there, all the life-energies and all the powers. The beings of this world have by their nature a strange grip over the material world and can exercise upon it a sinister influence.Some of them are formed out of the remains of the human being that persist after death in the vital atmosphere near to the earth-plane. His desires and hungers still float there and remain in form even after the dissolution of the body; often they are moved to go on manifesting and satisfying themselves and the birth of these creatures of the vital world is the consequence. But these are minor beings and, even if they can be very troublesome, it is yet not impossible to deal with them.There are others, far more dangerous, who have never been in human form; never were they born into a human body upon earth, for most often they refuse to accept this way of birth because it is slavery to matter and they prefer to remain in their own world, powerful and mischievous, and to control earthly beings from there. For, if they do not want to be born on earth, they do want to be in contact with the physical nature, but without being bound by it.Their method is

to try first to cast their influence upon a man;

then they enter slowly into his atmosphere and in the end may get complete possession of him,

driving out entirely the real human soul and personality.

These creatures, when in possession of an earthly body, may have the human appearance but they have not a human nature. Their habit is to draw upon the life-force of human beings; they attack and capture vital power wherever they can and feed upon it.

If they come into your atmosphere, you suddenly feel depressed and exhausted;

if you are near them for some time you fall sick;

if you live with one of them, it may kill you.

– But how is one to get such creatures out of one's environment when they are once there?The vital power incarnated in these beings is of a very material kind and it is effective only within a short distance. Ordinarily, if you do not live in the same house or if you are not in the same company with them, you do not come within their influence. But if you open some channel of connection or communication, through letters, for example, then you make possible an interchange of forces and are liable to be influenced by them even from a far distance.The wisest way with these beings is to cut off all connection and have nothing to do with them – unless indeed you have great occult knowledge and power and have learned how to cover and protect yourself – but even then it is always a dangerous thing to move about with them. To hope to transform them, as some people do, is a vain illusion; for they do not want to be transformed. They have no intention of allowing any transformation and all effort in that direction is useless.These beings, when in the human body, are not often conscious of what they really are. Sometimes they have a vague feeling that they are not quite human in the ordinary way. But still there are cases where they are conscious and very conscious; not only do they know that they do not belong to humanity but they know what they are, act in that knowledge and deliberately pursue their ends. The beings of the vital world are powerful by their very nature; when to their power they add knowledge, they become doubly dangerous.There is nothing to be done with these creatures; you should avoid having any dealings with them unless you have the power to crush and destroy them. If you are forced into contact with them, beware of the spell they can cast. These vital beings, when they manifest on the physical plane, have always a great hypnotic power; for the centre of their consciousness is in the vital world and not in the material and they are not veiled and dwarfed by the material consciousness as human beings are.

There is always a drawing of [occult] vital forces from one to another in all human social mixture that takes place automatically. Sex is one of the most powerful ways of each drawing upon the other's vital force, or of one drawing the other's, which also often happens in a one-sided way to the great detriment of the "other". In the passage come many things good and bad, elation, feeling of strength and support, infiltration of good or bad qualities, interchange of psychological moods, states and movements, depressions, exhaustion – the whole gamut. People don't know it – which is a mercy of God upon them – but when one gets into a certain yogic consciousness, one becomes very much aware and sensitive to all this interchange and action and reaction, but also one can build a wall against, reject etc.People who have desires add to the mental formation a kind of small envelope, a vital shell which gives it a still greater reality. These people are usually surrounded by a number of tiny entities which are their own formations, their own mental formations clothed with vital force, which come all the time to strike them to try to make them realize materially the formations they have made.You have perhaps read the books of Maurice Magre (1877-1941). He describes this; he had come here, Maurice Magre, and we spoke and he told me that he had always noticed – he was highly sensitive – he had always noticed that people who have [excessive/pathological] sexual desires are surrounded by a kind of small swarm of entities who are somewhat viscous and rather ugly and which torment them constantly, awakening desire in them.He said he had seen this around certain people. It was like being surrounded by a swarm of mosquitoes, yes! But it is more gross, and much uglier still, and it is viscous, it is horrible, and it turns round and round the person and gives him no peace, and it awakens in him the desire that has formed these entities and they batten on it. It is their food. This is absolutely true. His observation was quite correct. His vision was very true. It is like that. The sex-vampire eats up the other's vital and gives nothing or very little.Sri Aurobindo [Aurobindo Ghose] (1872-1950) Indian British Hindu philosopher, yogi, mystic, guru, freedom fighter, poet, The Hidden Forces of Life. Selections from the Works of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Lotus Brands, Wisconsin, June 1999, Sri Aurobindo Ashram Publications, Pondicherry, India, 1st edition 16. March 2009